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Mayor Johnson, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bendy bus

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The 507 (Wikipedia, TfL) and 521 (Wikipedia, TfL) are going to be the first London bus routes to have the bendy bus removed. This is going to make my commute into work longer. Bendy buses have attracted a lot of opprobrium; read on to find out why they’re actually a really good idea.

Graphic of a bendy bus

The 507 and 521 are the last of the Red Arrow routes that were set up in the mid-Sixties to deal with short, high-density, commuter journeys. The idea was twofold; increase bus capacity and, crucially, the speed with which people could board and alight from the bus, thereby increasing route capacity and decreasing journey time. Obviously, it takes more time to use a double-decker; there’s only one exit door and passengers can’t go up and down the stairs at the same time; in any case, people taking short journeys are less likely to go up the stairs, leading to overcrowding downstairs. The solution was to move to a single-decker bus with less seats but more standing room and to allow people to leave by the front door as well.

The 507 and 521 routes haven’t changed in their requirements since the Sixties. Both run between major termini that are close together; in the 507’s case, Waterloo and Victoria and, in the 521’s, Waterloo and London Bridge. More importantly, they go through places where lots of commuters want to go; the 521 goes past Holborn, St Paul’s and Monument (all areas with lots of offices that people who come in by train to Waterloo and London Bridge want to reach) and the 507 goes up Horseferry Road. That’s significant because I board the bus at Horseferry Road but also because the buses, in both directions, practically empty in the morning on the Horseferry Road stops as lots of civil servants go to work in the area; conversely, the buses fill up in the evening peak and empty at the termini.

The bendy buses are ideal for these routes. They can accomodate a lot of people, who can board and alight quickly and in large numbers, travelling over short distances. The ideal would probably be a tram but these are costly to install and there are other priorities, not least the Cross River Tram and, of course, Crossrail. The bendy buses are an ideal solution. The alternative that we are going to have is the double-decker. I like double-deckers, but they’re not appropriate for these routes. I’m sure a lot of people who take traditional double-deckers in the morning rush from major rail stations will be familiar with the long boarding times as everyone clambers on in the one place. You can usually find a seat upstairs (hence the iBus announcement: “Seats are available on the Upper Deck”) as many people are only going a few stops and don’t want to have to fight up and down the stairs. On the 507 and 521 routes, that will be worsened by everyone wanting to leave the bus over two or three stops.

A particular issue for the 521 is the Strand Underpass. It connects the northern end of Waterloo Bridge directly to the top of Kingsway. Originally built for trams, it is not high enough for double-deckers. Presumably, the 521 will have to be diverted round the Aldwych and up Kingsway. These are two busy roads that will become further congested and will delay the 521.

Some of the arguments against the bendy bus are also rubbish. The big one is that there’s lots of fare evasion; I’m sure that’s true on some routes. On the 507 and 521 – the first routes to have bendies removed – just about everyone is using a major rail terminus. They’re probably going to have a Travelcard already – which includes London buses.

Bendy buses aren’t appropriate for every route. The 36, for instance, isn’t ideal for going across Cambridge Circus. That doesn’t mean they’re not appropriate for any route. Unfortunately, bus policy – not necessarily the most fascinating of issues – is being decided by little more than tabloid prejudice.

I’ll see you in the queue.

xD.

Update: Peezedtee weighs in and, in fact, weighed in back in March.

Fannie and Freddie’s moral hazards

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been taken into ‘conservatorship’. I’m no expert, but the issuing of new, common stock to the federal government and the drop in value of existing stock means that, effectively, Fannie and Freddie have been nationalised, albeit on a temporary basis. The Congressional Budget Office has apparently said that the potential cost is on the order of US$25bn. The about guaranteed by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is US$5.3tn or, put another way, twice the size of the entire UK economy. I wonder if this is the largest nationalisation ever.

Bailouts like this always raise the spectre of moral hazard. The implication was always there as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were set up as Government-Sponsored Enterprises; indeed, Ginnie Mae, which was hived off from Fannie Mae in 1968, actually has federal guarantees. In short, if an organisation knows that it will not be allowed to fail, it will take greater risks than it might otherwise do.

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said, according to Guardian Daily, that the two institutions are “so big and so interwoven in the financial system that a failure of either of them would affect the whole world economy”. The result is that there is moral hazard by the very existence of players that have such an overwhelming position in a given market; the implication is that, should everything go west, the state will have to intervene.

I do wonder if the same applies when everyone in a given market is heavily involved in a given part of that market, particularly when the market as a whole is important. If everyone in banking became heavily involved in, say, arbitrage. If a problem were to emerge with the arbitrage market, the state might be forced to intervene because of the effective monoculture. There is a moral hazard in the existence of that monoculture. You would hope that individual banks (or whatever) would avoid such a position or, at least, advertise to their investors that they are engaging in a risky affair. If everyone’s doing it, groupthink will dimish the perception of risk and, because the system cannot be allowed to catastrophically fail, take advantage of the moral hazard.

xD.

Maggie and me

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I have a strange relationship with Maggie.

I don’t really remember the Thatcher days for two good reasons. One, I was born in the early eighties and was far too young to have any cognisance of politics and, two, I spent the first few years of my life in Brazil. Nevertheless, it seems she has had something of an impact on my life and not just because she was PM.

However, the charge of Thatcherism – either a high accolade or grave insult, depending on point of view – is one that I hear banded about fairly often; it is always an emotionally loaded term. Certainly, it was usually meant at LSE as an insult; strange, given that most of my contemporaries weren’t politically aware during her tenure.

Funnily enough, I once beat her in an election. Sort of. The LSE Students’ Union elects an Honorary President each year and, one year, the only candidate was Margaret Thatcher (I think her ballot description was ‘Champion of Freedom’). Fortunately, RON (‘Re-open nominations’) is always a candidate, and so I ended up running the opposing campaign. The posters and leaflets I did were simple; all they consisted of was a picture of Thatcher with the slogan ‘Vote for RON or Maggie wins’. RON won. The assorted leftists (as Donal Blaney would doubtless have called us) all had great fun in chanting ‘Maggie-Maggie-Maggie Out-Out-Out’.

Why?

Other than reading history books and looking at dry statistics, my parents have probably given me the summary of Thatcherism that most influences me. They are, perhaps, well-placed to comment, as they were out of the country, watching from afar, and saw one, sharp change from the late seventies and very early eighties to the very late eighties and early nineties rather than a longer, slower change. There is a temptation to think that, pre-Thatcher, we had, in Arend Ljiphart’s words, ‘a kindler, gentler democracy’1. That is, of course, a load of rubbish. The trenchant trades unions undermined that notion and I am, in any case, deeply sceptical of the so-called postwar consensus. What is certain, though, is that the eighties were a period of strife; political, economic and social.

When I ran the RON campaign, Mrs T was promoted as a ‘champion of freedom’; indeed, I think that was her ballot description. Freedom is considered by a lot of people to be the summum bonum; it has achieved totemic status. The problem is that we cannot agree on what freedom is.

While Mrs Thatcher and her advocates purported to conceive of liberty in negative terms, there seems to me to have been an emphasis on the coercive arms of the state – the armed forces and the police – and an awful lot of moralising. Rather negative liberties, it rather seems that Thatcherism was about promoting a particular conception of ‘the good life’, using the state to create it and allowing inaction on the part of the state where existing processes gave acceptable results. It makes the mistake of confusing no action with null action; choosing not to act is not necessarily a return to some default position and, even if it could be shown to be more ‘natural’ (for want of a better word) it would not mean that it was ‘better’.

Norman Tebbit attacked a lot of the opposition to the the Thatcherite project as the result of a ‘second-rate’ decade – the 60s. If Tebbit was right to say that the education of the sixties made the adults of the eighties, it would seem to make sense to say that the adults of today – including any resultant societal problems – are the result of the education of the eighties I emphasise that education is more than what happens in schools.

I suppose, ultimately, I’m asking a question in a rather roundabout way. Having no memory of this apparent, pre-Thatcher Golden Age, to what extent am I one of Thatcher’s children, not so much in terms of economic status but in terms of political outlook?

One last thing; can anyone think of a better way of phrasing the zero/null distinction I made above?

xD.

1 – Lijhpart, Patterns of Democracy. Summary here, buy it here.

PS – I should be blogging more frequently next week. Work, home, stress, you know the drill.

Memento mori

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I went to the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition of London skeletons, mostly found during rebuilding and renovation works, on Euston Road. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a rather sobering experience. Nearly two thousand years of life and death in the capital are displayed, from the probably overweight, bon-vivant William Wood (84) to an unborn child, its bones still lying within its mother even after death.

The bones tell us a remarkable amount about the lives of past Londoners. The scars left on the bones show lives of excess, through gout and arthritis, to lives of want and disease, through syphilis and rickets. Even the place of burial indicates social status, with the rich buried in Chelsea while the residents of the workhouse and the prison might have had their eternal repose in St Bride’s Lower Churchard. I wonder what tales are being told, not to be read perhaps for centuries until our bodies are dug up for some future building works, in our bones. Will future visitors wonder at the inequities and injustices of our time and decry the situation that allowed such differences between rich and poor as we now look back?

On the subject of the transience of human life, I’ve recently read a remarkable book called Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon that deals with the future evolution of homo sapiens, through eighteen distinct, future species. It is remarkable both for the timespan it covers – two billion years – and for illustrating, despite all the advances we may make, that homo sapiens is a product of its evolution and that its end, although it may be delayed through skill and cunning, is inevitable. The ultimate message, in all this futility, is that ‘the good life’, if I may mix my metaphors, is in the searching for, but not the finding of, the Grail.

Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento!
– Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man!
Warning traditionally read by a slave to a victorious Roman general at his Triumphal march.

xD.

In answer to Chris Dillow

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Chris ‘Stumbling and Mumbling’ Dillow asks five questions. Here are my answers; number two is the best. I’ve put Chris’s questions in italics.

1. The government wants children to learn about the slave trade. But in 18th century England, how much different were the living conditions of the average slave from those of the average unskilled worker? I mean, both got a bare subsistence living and neither had political rights. But slaves had more job security. So how bad was slavery compared to free labour?

I know the passage from Africa was horrific, and there are examples of terrible mistreatment of both slaves and workers. But I’m asking about averages. Anecdotes aren’t enough. And don’t give me any nonsensical effort to empathise from today’s perspective.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence – the pictures of beaten slaves and of (free) children pulling heavy carts through narrow mineshafts – that life for most people in the 1700s was not pleasant. That, however, doesn’t answer Chris’s question. To do that, we’d need detailed breakdowns of the socioeconomic situation of the various types and classes of people at the time. They are not, so far as I know, available.

However, slavery was not just an economic condition. It is very much tied in to race and religion; the question of whether non-whites even had souls was prevalent. While the economics of the situation are worth studying, the moral justifications that were deployed and the attempt to keep slavery out of sight and out of mind are worth studying too; after all, “one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.”1

In any case, the eighteenth century was one of great change that saw the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions and the move from the countryside to the city. I would add that, although villeinage had disappeared in England by 1700, villeins existed in Scotland until 1799.

2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? And if we don’t apply such reasoning, why not? Why is the restrictive CBA of Nice only applied to drugs, rather than to all public spending?

Actually, NGS doesn’t want to do that or, at least, if they do they haven’t told anyone. I telephoned the NGS’s contact for the Sutherland purchase and they have not announced how they propose to fund it. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they want to take it out of general taxation.

Using QALYs would, in time, almost by definition suggest that the spending is justified. It is a one-off purchase of two paintings that will also secure a long-term loan on a further fourteen pieces of art. If we say that, on a scale of one to zero, one is perfect health while zero is dead, we can give a figure to the change in QALYs from the expenditure.
I quote from the entry on NICE’s website on QALYs:

Patient x has a serious, life-threatening condition.

If he continues receiving standard treatment he will live for 1 year and his quality of life will be 0.4 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If he receives the new drug he will live for 1 year 3 months (1.25 years), with a quality of life of 0.6.

The new treatment is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: 1 (year’s extra life) x 0.4 = 0.4 QALY

New treatment: 1.25 (1 year, 3 months extra life) x 0.6 = 0.75 QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to 0.35 additional QALYs (that is: 0.75 –0.4 QALY = 0.35 QALYs).

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £10,000, standard treatment costs £3000.

The difference in treatment costs (£7000) is divided by the QALYs gained (0.35) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £20,000 per QALY.

Let me substitute a little.

Person y has a serious, life-threatening condition; they are alive and therefore will die in n years.

If they continue receiving standard treatment they will live for n years and his quality of life will be m, where 0? m ? 1 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If they receive the new drug they will live for n years (assuming that art doesn’t affect length of life), with a quality of life of m + b, where b is the benefit in terms of quality of life derived from viewing the art

The new treatment, art, is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: n x m = nm QALY

New treatment: n x (m+b) = nm+nb QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to nb additional QALYs

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £50,000,000, inaction costs £0.

The difference in treatment costs (£50,000,000) is divided by the QALYs gained (nb) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £50,000,000/nb per QALY.

Let us say that a nice trip to the gallery to see the picture is equal to a positive change of one one-thousandth, or 0.001. We very quickly see that the cost, given that n is constant, per QALY is an astronomical number: 50000000000. That, however, is for one person. To bring it down to the £30,000 limit suggested by the NHS, 1,666,667 people would have to see the paintings. That’s not per year; that’s in total ever. NGS tell me that one and a half million people visit the National Galleries of Scotland per year, a million of which go to the National Gallery of Scotland where the Titian is.

It may be that my assumption of one one-thousandth of a QALY is too high. It wouldn’t matter; you’d have to wait longer to derive the benefit, but it would happen. It is also, of course, possible that it is too low. Not everyone who sees the paintings (the total is fourteen) is going to be someone off the street. Some will be schoolchildren on guided tours who may have a lifelong interest sparked in art; I’m sure you can think of other, equally unquantifiable examples.

You could also add into the calculation the benefit of the continuation of these major works of art to the local economy, including the increased publicity they will receive from the coverage of the possible purchase.

I wonder if Chris has been reading Bentham; the QALY method is the descendant of the felicific calculus and I’m sure that he would like to think he’s had an impact. The reason, I suspect, that this form of CBA is only applied to medical treatments for two reasons. Firstly, medical types tend to have a decent grasp of statistics and so are more likely to come up with ways of quantifying abstracts like ‘quality of life’. Doing the same thing for, say, Trident would be a lot harder as you have to make unprovable, untestable assumptions about the effect of having nuclear weapons. You could say that having a bell on a stick would prevent us from being nuked and it would be just as hard to prove. It is also hard to test the effect, if any, of things like prestige. I suspect, though, that the main reason is that the budgets for the NHS in general and medicines in particular are so large that they cannot be ignored and that, as the Government wanted to move responsibility away from itself, both to avoid the demands of political exigence and thereby to give a fairer result, NICE was set up and went about things in the best way it could.

3. How can academics be so quick to close down free speech? Surely, any proper teacher must know that the solution to mistaken beliefs is to correct them through discussion – that’s what teaching means. Academics must therefore support free speech, by definition. Does this episode merely corroborate my prejudice, that a close interest in the Israel-Palestine question is dangerous for one’s mental health?

Unfortunately, there are plenty of academics who don’t sign up to the scientific method; I point to many of the people involved in promoting creationism or intelligent design and, for some excellent rebuttal, Thunderf00t’s YouTube channel.

Mistaken beliefs should, in theory, be correctable by teaching so long as the belief is honestly held on a misappreciation of facts or misapplication of argument. Often, the aim is not to find any sort of ‘truth’ or answer but to ensure that your side wins; the fervour behind that aim, whether religious or secular, is such that any methods are justified leading to a lack of understanding in why what can be broadly termed the scientific method is important. That leads to lazy citation and research and quoting David Duke.

In answer to the final point, yes. I agree with much of Dave Osler’s thinking about the problems around discussing the area at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean.

4. Companies are moving their head offices to Ireland or Luxembourg to save tax. So, is there something to be said for a cut in corporation tax, financed by higher top income tax rates? The idea here is that companies’ head offices are more mobile than individual high-earners, and it doesn’t matter much anyway if a few of these leave or retire anyway. So we protect tax revenues without increasing inequality. What’s wrong with this?

In a unitary state, not much. However, in a country like the USA, where a slight rise in corporation tax could allow for a reduction in income tax in a given state, making people move to a state next to the state where they work. Indeed, it could make sense for a state to try to ride the Laffer curve if they have a nearby headquarters. Ultimately, it depends on whether the costs of moving justify the rewards of lower taxes for a given high-earner.

As to what might be wrong with this, we well know that the majority of the press will not report such subtleties other than as ‘tax rise’ or an attack on anything resembling progressive taxation.

I have wondered what would happen if we scrapped all taxes except income tax, adjusting the total take accordingly; I suspect, though, that whatever we did companies and other states would play the system to their advantage.

5. Merrill Lynch has lost a quarter of the profits it made in 36 years in just 18 months. Does this show that the profits to investment banking are a reward for taking black swan risk? You make decent profits, on average, in exchange for massive losses on rare occasions? Were Merrill’s profits (and those of other investment bankers) in good times merely a reward for taking this obscure risk? Did they – and their rivals – really fully understand what they were doing, or were they just lucky punters? What would count as persuasive evidence here?

Persuasive evidence here would be pretty hard to come by as we are only looking, for the most part, at the actions rather than the rationale. The turnover in staff may also mean that people came in without sufficient time to analyse the situation and those that did thought that the expectation of the low probability event given a short time at that company was low enough to take the risk. I would add that Merrill Lynch and others may have actually had a role in causing and worsening the crunch that has led to their losses.

Are there interesting, non-trivial answers here that are well-founded in evidence? Or is it that there’s a lot we don’t know?

Both, I’d say.

xD.

1 – cited from a judgement of 1569 by counsel for Somersett, a slave, in Somersett’s Case (R. v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett) of 1772 which “held that slavery was unlawful in England (but not other parts of the British Empire”

Dates of ensoulment

Posted on by David Landon Cole

One of Nadine Dorries’ most frequent lines in the debate around abortion has been that all religious people oppose abortion. This is clearly nonsense. The existence of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice gives the lie to that. It might just be possible to argue that the overwhelming preponderance of religious opinion is absolutely opposed to abortion and that those who are religious but allow for abortion are rare anomalies.

The ever-informative Prospect magazine, in its ‘News & Curiosities’ column, has this factoid, attributed to Between the Monster and the Saint by Richard Holloway:

Catholics believe that the soul comes into existence at the exact moment of conception. In Greek Orthodoxy, “ensoulment” happens at 21 days, in Islam at 40 days, and in Judaism at 80 days.

The creation or incarnation of the soul is one of the bases of religious objections. Although the picture is rather more complicated than this – see my post of [date] on – I’m just glad that something with a bigger readership than me has noticed that religions don’t conform to certain preconceptions!

I’m sorry to bang on about this. Actually, I’m not at all sorry. I just hope I don’t become tedious. I am increasingly convinced that, should the Conservative Party win the next general election, there will be restrictions placed on abortion. Much of Ms Dorries’ opposition is based on her telegraphic memory1 and I fear the small-c conservative, religious movement may also seek to make retrograde steps elsewhere.

xD.

1 – she makes it up…

Iraqi interpreters: HMG response to e-petition

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The Government has responded on its new Number Ten website to the petition for locally employed Iraqis. It reads:

Thank you for your e-petition requesting that Locally Engaged (LE) staff in Iraq should be offered asylum in the UK.

In a written parliamentary Statement on 9 October 2007 , the Foreign Secretary acknowledged that LE Iraqi staff working for our Armed Forces and civilian missions in Iraq have made an invaluable contribution, in uniquely difficult circumstances, to the UK’s effort to support security, stability and development in Iraq. In recognition of this, the Government made the decision to offer these staff, on an ex gratia basis, assistance which goes above and beyond legal and contractual requirements.

Serving staff (defined for the scheme as those employed on or after 8 August 2007) who meet the criteria, are able to apply for one of three forms of assistance: a one-off package of financial assistance; leave to enter the UK, outside the immigration rules; or the opportunity of resettlement in the UK through the UK’s Gateway refugee resettlement programme. Former staff (defined as those whose employment ended before 8 August 2007), are able to apply for one of two forms of assistance: a one-off package of financial assistance; or the opportunity of resettlement in the UK through the UK’s Gateway refugee resettlement programme.

The Government has taken into account the need to ensure that any assistance scheme, in particular in respect of admission to or resettlement in the UK, is practical, realistic and preserves the integrity of wider immigration and asylum policy. For these reasons, the Government has sought to ensure that admission to the UK is managed as far as possible in line with existing processes and programmes. The UK Border Agency has worked closely with Employing Departments to develop a transparent process to assist eligible LE Iraqi staff in accessing the scheme.

Further details of the scheme of assistance were published in a written Ministerial Statement on 30 October 2007.

Since the scheme of assistance the UK is offering to Locally Engaged Iraqi staff was announced, staff across government have assessed just over 500 people as being eligible for assistance. Their cases are being taken forward as quickly as possible. To date, about 60% of those eligible, who have so far informed us of their preferred form of assistance, have opted for financial assistance.

The first individuals who chose to come to the UK with Indefinite Leave to Enter outside the Immigration Rules, arrived in April 2008 and July 2008. The first groups of former staff who have been accepted for resettlement to the UK under Gateway arrived in the UK in July and August 2008. Arrangements are being made to welcome others to the UK over the coming weeks and months.

We continue to fully recognise the efforts of LE Iraqi staff and remain committed to demonstrating our debt of gratitude to them.

I will be posting more later.

xD.

London papers

Posted on by David Landon Cole

London needs greater media diversity.

I’m going to explain the situation, why it’s bad and then propose a solution.

The Evening Standard has something close to a monopolistic position on London news. It is, as we know, the only paid-for London newspaper. Metro, London Lite and thelondonpaper are meant to be read on the way to or from work and are entertainment – hence the huge amount of celebrity gossip – rather than news. Some local papers – the Camden New Journal, for instance – are pretty good, but some areas don’t have any decent, local paper.

I would also say that the Evening Standard focuses (if I may pinch Ken Livingstone’s phrase) on the area around the wine bars and brothels of Westminster and, now, City Hall; it deals with trivia and minutiae. My objections to the Evening Standard‘s position are not because it is right-wing, obsessed with Ken or a bit tabloid. Rather, it is that they are unchallenged in their position. My objection to the newspaper market in London is that it leaves great swathes of GLA and borough politics untouched.

If we move away from the print media, the situation is not good. ITV London News has nothing of the politics of the capital, but only stories of interest. BBC News is, I feel, slightly better but still pretty woeful. Channel Four News and Sky News don’t cover the capital other than in passing. Moving to the online world, I want to weep. The ES‘s main website is thisislondon.co.uk, an entertainment guide, where showbiz comes above news. Its news site, standard.co.uk or thisislondon.co.uk/standard, is very much a second-string site; do a search for Evening Standard and you’ll see that only thisislondon.co.uk is anywhere to be seen. BBC London News just doesn’t have many stories.
In particular, I wonder how many people could name, say, three members of the Assembly. I wonder how many people know what the GLA does and doesn’t do.

I do want to flag three blogs in particular – Dave Hill’s London: Mayor and More; the Tory Troll; and Boris Watch – for their good coverage. While much of their content is great, it is not enough; I hope my reasons why will become clear later on.

All this together effectively gives the Evening Standard a bully-pulpit. While Teddy Roosevelt meant ‘bully’ in the positive, now-arcane sense, I fear that the Evening Standard does not quite match the idea of “a terrific platform from which to persuasively advocate an agenda”. (C-Span Congressional Glossary).

There has been at least one attempt at direct competition with the ES in the past; Bob Maxwell’s London Daily News. Suffice to say, it failed. By resurrecting the Evening News and slashing prices to 5p, Associated were able to stop the London Daily News. The situation now is different; for one, the freesheet model has matured. I’d add that with the initials ‘LDN’, a London Daily News might fare better after Lily Allen’s song.

Equally, I don’t think everyone wants all celebrity news, all the time; I do not want a ‘Lite’ newspaper. The World, Stephen Glover’s proposed, new compact picks up on that idea; see the Wikipedia article for more information.

There is room and need for competition for the broader (rather than just middle market tabloid) London news market. Despite its attempts to move upmarket, ES’s news coverage is pretty poor. It doesn’t cover borough politics and only lightly covers the Mayor and GLA.

However, the ES retains several advantages. One is brand recognition; another is its distribution network. As an aside, I wonder what effect all those anti-Ken placards had in the run-up to the election; at any rate, those placards and the orange vans are a lot of advertising around the city. I don’t think it’s too much to say that the ES and its sellers are part of the street-scape of London; I would say, though, that the distinctive yellows and purples of London Lite and thelondonpaper, together with the muted annoyance at being attacked with freesheets at every station in zone one, have become part of the street-scape, too.

This leads me onto an area where I think the ES has singularly failed to capitalise; the online realm.
If I can take the issue of brand recognition first, ES, largely because of its decision to run as thisislondon.co.uk online, doesn’t have the on- or off- line, perceived web presence of some other outlets. Much as I like it, neither does Londonist – which isn’t really a news site – or thelondondailynews.com (no relation, I believe, to Cap’n Bob’s paper of the same name).

The other devolved administrations – Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, with respectively three, one-and-three-quarter and five million inhabitants – have their own competitive newspaper markets and, I am given to understand, the national papers have regional editions for the nations. London (eight million), effectively the fifth home nation and the economic, cultural and political centre of our country, does not have that and suffers as a result.

I believe that better news coverage and debate about London – effectively the fifth home nation – would be a good thing. The question is how.

In keeping with Guardian America and Guardian Weekly as successful sub-sets of the Guardian brand, I’d like to propose Guardian London.

Its primary issues could be City Hall, including the Mayor, Assembly and executive arms; London beyond zones one and two; transport; the boroughs; the City; and informing people about the reality of London today. Over an eight-week cycle, there could be information on the council politics of the different boroughs, grouped as four at a time. To begin with, there could be a guide – one a week – to each of the boroughs. It should also look at what might be called the civil society of each borough.

The arrival of Crossrail is one particular issue that deserves attention that the existing media offer singularly fails to address. To take just one station as an example: Tottenham Court Road. Crossrail allows for the development of a better, larger, more accessible station but the Astoria and Sin will go and the Paolozzi murals on the platforms need to be maintained. I’m sure there are similar issues at just about every station on the Crossrail line and will be in future on the Crossrail 2/Chelney line. All we will get will be a glitzy, CGI, double-page spread when it’s far too late to do anything about the changes as the station is about to open. Instead of the newspapers giving us news and comment to allow us to form opinions, they’re giving us re-cycled press releases.

It would do well to do profiles of the main people in London politics; the Mayor, various deputy Mayors, GLA members, people who run and are on the boards of the MPA, TfL, LDA, LFEPA and any future authorities for waste, recycling, education, skills, the environment and planning.
Initially, it could operate a purely online outfit. Journalists need not be retained but could be remunerated on the same basis as CiF. If successful, it could perhaps grow to a weekly supplement to the print edition in London, and perhaps the south-east, on Saturdays.

If we look at the blogosphere and social media, the combination of individual blogs, group blogs, media blogs like Comment is Free and Coffee House, Facebook and so on, we see a potentially powerful combination for attracting people’s attention and engaging them in the London polis.

The trick would be to attract people to local goings-on – whether campaigns over a particular issue, calls for involvement, bouncing around ideas or just keeping people in the loop – by cross-pollinating from the main Guardian. There are all manner of local campaigns, organised on the internet, that act on different facets of the same issue that should be given greater, public exposure. An example might be the Better 172 Now campaign to improve the 172 bus route; I’m sure there are similar issues that ‘citizen journalists’ could report that would be of interest to people who don’t live on the Brockley-St Paul’s route. At the moment, they are too fragmented.

Local papers often suffer from a lack of critical mass; the use of the Guardian’s existing online community and brand could help increase the traffic, as (dare I say it) could its more user-friendly website.

Because people move from one part of the city to another on a regular basis, they are going to be interested in what’s going on away from where they live, whether it’s because they go there for work, socialising or recreation. Equally, many ‘local’ issues become London-wide, in no small part because of the re-institution of strategic, City-wide governance. There is the need and the potential for a new entrant to London news.

xD.

UPDATE: An edited version of this post appeared on Liberal Conspiracy.

Secret inquests, revisited

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I wrote on the first of April of this year about provisions in the Counter-Terrorism Bill for restricting the openness of inquests. It seems that it wasn’t just me who was concerned about some of the proposals; the Guardian reports that section 64 is under fire1:

A cross-party committee of peers, including a former lord chief justice and two former attorney-generals, has told the government that any decision to hold an inquest without a jury must be taken by a judge and not a minister.

I cannot help but think that this would be a good thing. The bill is not necessary – as I said on the original post, things can be heard in camera if necessary – and, while I don’t think the Government would abuse the powers, this is handing a power to obfuscate government actions resulting in deaths to every future government. I don’t trust future governments, their members as yet unborn, sight unseen.

xD.

1 – the article says 63, but I think they mean 64.

We are ZCTU

Posted on by David Landon Cole

A little while ago, I wrote a post here and on the Wardman Wire called ‘Help Zimbabwe from your chair’.

We Are ZCTU: Defend unionists on trial in ZimbabweLovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, respectively the President and General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions (ZCTU), were being charged with ’spreading falsehoods prejudicial to the state’. Those falsehoods are, in fact, criticisms they made on May Day of Mugabe’s government and telling the truth about the violence today in Zimbabwe.

The TUC, the UK equivalent of ZCTU, and ITUC, the international version, organised a mosaic depicting Lovemore and Wellington made up of faces of trades unionists from around the world. You can see it at WeAreZCTU.org. There are also tools to spread the word, add your support and to lobby for justice. There are model letters to send there as well.

xD.